A Penn State study using a virtual reality buffet found that when people see more food options, they pile significantly more calories on their plates. The work points to simple ways dining halls, buffets and even home cooks can design environments that support healthier choices.
At big holiday dinners, all-you-can-eat buffets and campus dining halls, it can feel like more options mean more freedom. New research from Penn State suggests they may also mean more calories.
Using an immersive virtual reality buffet, nutritional scientists found that when people were offered a wider variety of foods, they loaded their plates with far more calories — especially from rich, high-energy items — even though the total weight of food they took stayed about the same.
The study, published in the journal Appetite, focused on a familiar setting: a buffet line similar to those where millions of college students eat every day.
“This study examined what drives people to overconsume food at a buffet similar to dining halls, where millions of college students eat every day,” first author John Long, a postdoctoral scholar in food science and nutritional sciences at Penn State, said in a news release.
The research team recruited 50 adults between ages 18 and 65 to visit the lab for three separate sessions, scheduled around lunch or dinner. Each time, participants put on a virtual reality headset and entered a digital buffet restaurant, where they used handheld controllers to pick up and serve foods just as they would in real life.
Across the three visits, the number of food options changed. One buffet offered nine items, another 18, and another 27. In every case, the spread included a similar balance of high-energy-dense foods, such as cookies, and low-energy-dense foods, such as vegetables, so that only the level of variety shifted.
Before coming in, participants were asked to avoid food, caffeine and exercise for several hours, to ensure they arrived hungry. The VR system automatically recorded how much food they selected by weight, how many calories that food contained, and how much of it came from high- versus low-calorie items.
Previous work by Long and senior author Travis Masterson, an assistant professor of nutritional science at Penn State, had already shown that people’s choices in the VR buffet closely match what they pick at a real buffet. That validation allowed the team to lean on virtual tools instead of preparing full physical spreads for every participant and every condition.
“It is costly and wasteful to make an entire buffet so that a single participant can use it at mealtime, especially if that participant needs to go through the buffet multiple times, like in this study,” Masterson said in the news release. “And when we need a different setup, it is much easier to change a setting in VR than it is to alter the amount of food on a buffet.”
The results revealed a striking pattern. When the buffet offered only nine items, participants selected just over 600 grams of food. When the choices expanded to 18 or 27 items, they took more than 900 grams.
Even so, Long points out there appeared to be a natural upper limit to how much food, by weight, people were willing to put on their plates.
“External factors clearly influence what and how much people eat,” Long said. “But there seems to be a ceiling to the total weight of food selected for a meal, even as variety increases.”
Calories told a different story. At the nine-item buffet, participants chose an average of about 850 calories. With 18 options, that jumped to around 1,320 calories, an increase of roughly 55%. When 27 foods were available, the average climbed to nearly 1,500 calories — about 75% more than at the smallest buffet.
The extra calories came largely from high-energy-dense foods.
“When presented with more options, people became more likely to choose higher calorie-dense foods,” Long added.
The findings echo a broader concern in nutrition science: in environments packed with tempting, convenient choices, many people end up eating more energy than they need. The Penn State team’s work suggests that variety itself — not just portion size or taste — can nudge people toward overeating.
To understand who might be most vulnerable to this effect, the researchers also had participants complete surveys about their personalities and eating habits. They looked at traits such as openness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism and conscientiousness, as well as tendencies like emotional eating and willingness to try new foods.
Among the five major personality traits, only conscientiousness — often associated with self-discipline and goal-focused behavior — seemed to matter. People who scored higher on conscientiousness were less swayed by the expanded buffet. When more options were available, they added fewer extra calories and were better at limiting high-calorie foods than those lower in conscientiousness.
This suggests that some individuals may be naturally better at resisting the pull of variety, while others may need more support from their surroundings to stay on track.
The researchers say that support should not rest solely on willpower. Instead, they argue, the design of food environments — from college dining halls and cafeterias to catered events and restaurant buffets — can be adjusted to make healthy choices easier and overeating less likely.
“If we identify the aspects of our modern food environment — excessive variety, slick packaging, processed foods and more — that increase how much people eat, we can redesign our environment to help us make healthier food choices,” added Long.
That could mean offering fewer high-calorie options at once, highlighting lower-calorie dishes more prominently, or structuring buffet lines so that fruits, vegetables and lean proteins appear first and in greater variety, while richer desserts and fried foods are limited in number or placed later.
The work also has implications at home. Families and students might think about how many different indulgent foods they keep on hand, how they arrange their plates, or how many dishes they prepare for a single meal.
The study is part of a larger effort at Penn State to understand how modern food environments shape behavior and to use that knowledge to combat obesity and diet-related disease. Long, Masterson and their colleagues hope that by pinpointing subtle cues like variety, they can help shift responsibility away from individual blame and toward smarter design.
“By understanding the factors that drive our choices, we hope to be able to design eating environments that support health rather than overconsumption,” Long added.
As virtual reality tools become more common in research, the team expects to keep using them to test how different layouts, labels and food mixes influence what people put on their plates — and to find practical ways to make the healthy choice the easy, default choice.
Source: Pennsylvania State University